When the Dust Settles
by Eliza Farrow
Summary: (AU-ish for The Azran Legacy) Returning from the dead has its side effects. Stricken with amnesia, Professor Layton attempts to make sure everyone he cares about makes it out of the dying legacy unscathed. Harder than it sounds, when you barely remember their names. Part 1 of the Further Adventures series.
1. Chapter 1

_There was light—a blinding, incomprehensible light that speared him from all angles—and voices that he only half-knew were screaming in languages he knew did not exist. Gleeful, that light plucked at his mind, reeled memories from it like tape pulled from a cassette. Everything he knew was paper to a flame. Someone called Luke was screaming. He was quite sure he knew no Luke. All the names his mind could offer him—Luke, Emmy, Bronev, Descole, Aurora—felt foreign and strange to him, strings of words relating to faceless people._

 _At one point, he was sure, the pain had been unimaginable. Now, he felt the exertion it put on his mortal body like you would feel a breeze brush your cheek. Whatever he was now could not be touched by something as human as pain. Indeed, he felt every twitch, every cry, every tear that was pulled from his eyes, and whatever greater consciousness he had found marvelled at it, the great fragility of man laid out bare._

 _Tired of itself, the light quit its malignant trade and ceased to glow, letting darkness sweep in and claim what was left. It was not simple darkness, that stuff, not the tame dark that lives beneath closed eyelids. This dark was peacock feathers, ice winds, and open wounds. Layton—for he thought that was his name—was certain he could hear it laughing._

 _For the longest and shortest time, there was nothing. His soul stood in the void._

 _Then everything happened at once: ground and sky grew bored of their positions, switched; light was dark, dark was light, and the world knew of neither; heat chilled him where cold burnt his skin; and he had the brief vision of being stood in a room—a room without walls, a room where everything was a floor—and walking towards a table._

 _Upon that table, he knew, there was a puzzle. Solve it, and he knew that the room would dissolve in to something less than a dream._

All of that occurred in less than a second.

Hershel Layton opened his eyes and found himself staring down at a tiled floor that was a great deal closer to his face than usual. With an eyeless look, it stared back, a mixture of welcome and amusement in the face it did not have.

Heaving himself to his feet, Layton glanced about, recognising, one by one, the chamber, the crystals, and the three strangers, who were also beginning to rise. Each face was assigned a name—the too-small boy was Luke; the whiplash of a girl was Emmy; the grim, old man was Bronev—but he failed to give them meaning; the names tasted like dust.

By the fifth crystal, at its base, there lay a heap of grey fabric and feathers. Layton was briefly struck by a swirl of memory— _a barn owl crashing into their window and lying broken on the paving in a mess of bloodied plumage. Crying to his mother, his father's hand on his shoulder. A burial at the bottom of the garden, amidst the roots of an apple tree that hadn't born fruit in years._

With a tip of his hat, he commiserated, with this new owl, it's fruitless journey. Then he paused, feeling over what he instinctively knew to be the brim of the thing that found itself on his head. Though the soft fabric was intimately familiar, he had no memory if it becoming so, no recollection of placing the hat there.

The boy, Luke, also wore a hat. Layton wondered if they looked the same.

Shudders raced through the ground, splitting tiles in to pieces and throwing those pieces in the air. The very air seemed fit to break apart, as though great hands had it in a reckless grip and were pulling in separate directions. The thing in the centre, the thing that looked like a girl but was not a girl, screamed in a voice of fractured crystal.

"Go! All of you, please! You need to run; the Sanctuary is collapsing!" The words did not move her, her lips scarcely parted, he eyes dull and unblinking. But the fear in that high, childish voice would have been enough to turn an army.

Vaguely, Layton recalled a great height, an island suspended above a lake. That, he decided, was where they were taking up residence...an island which was beginning to fall.

 _There had been another island, he knew—one of traps and games. A long table bedecked with delicacies; a castle from an Escher painting; a mechanical nightmare, a plane made out of a barrel, and organ music._

 _There had been a man, a man with a sword. A man, without a face or a name, that the professor felt he had known his whole life._

"We must leave now!" He found himself calling to the collection of names in the room. Like manikins, they stood unmoving on their plinths, looking about them with glassy eyes. Luke turned to him; his young face was blank and waxen, and his eyes were cold like buttons.

 _"Let me go with you, professor! I could learn from you!"_

 _There was dead creature being washed down stream; a flooded town; a cult of market children in long coats; and a garden of unspeakable beauty with a thousand crystals instead of a sun._

 _There was a boy clinging to him, all spindly limbs and iron will._

Layton blinked. Luke was no longer a name; there was a boy behind the empty word, a companion knitted from trust. Luke Triton—he remembered the name, now, as though it had never been absent from him—his apprentice.

Layton extended a hand to the boy, a rope thrown out over a chasm separating two people who could hardly remember each other. "Come on Luke," he murmured, voice barely audible over the screams of the falling building. "We have to go."

Luke blinked once, blinked twice, life returning to the pools of his eyes. Hesitant fingers found Layton's and held them tight, with certainty that his face could not mirror.

"Ok...professor..." The last word emerged as a tremulous query. Layton squeezed the boy's hand and the tense little fingers redoubled their grip.

Turning to run—having spotted a fulgent stripe of daylight through a crumbling wall—Layton was brought to a stumbling halt by the boy. Like a little anchor, he was hauling the professor back, feet wedged against the ruined tiles.

"Emmy!" He cried shortly, confusion creasing his brow like linen, "we need to bring Emmy."

 _Emmy. A kick to the teeth, a snarky comment, long talks on cold nights, and highways that rang with the horns of beleaguered drivers..._

 _She was holding a blade of crystal to the vulnerable skin of Luke's throat, teasing the pulsing jugular with that fine razor edge while the boy struggled and cried._

 _"I'm Emmy Altava; your new assistant!"_

Layton looked at the girl—a woman really, though one several years his junior. She had snagged her lip between her front teeth and was chewing thoughtfully on it, the placid motions of her jaw the only movements she made. He wondered if she was aware of the blood trickling from the split in her lower lip; the inside of her mouth was tinted red with it.

"Come along Emmy, we can't leave you here" Layton ushered her along. A large segment of his disordered mind cursed her, urged him to leave her to the merciless whims of the collapsing building, but there was a portcullis in his heart that refused to let such an idea pass. Emmy would come with them, or they would all remain. Whatever came, they would stick together.

This time, Luke let them run, Emmy walking in brisk strides their side. The man that Layton presumed to be either 'Bronev' or 'Descole'—Bronev fitting more easily—tottered after them, looking uncertainly at the collapsing walls as though he desired to ask them why they fell and were waiting for an opportune moment to do so. Another memory lanced itself into Layton's skull.

 _An airship that was a curious blend of luxury and mad design. A butler, whose face was more moustache than anything else, a large cat snug by his feet. There was a man at the wheel, the tense lines of his shoulders drawn with anger and determination. Every time he looked at his host, Layton was reminded of night winds and a battle on top of a monster, of a city filling with sand, the taste of dust thick in the air._

Layton frowned, a premonition tugging at the sleeve of his thoughts. Somewhere along the line, he knew he had forgotten something important.

Too late to ask questions, too late for second guesses; they had reached a corridor that—through the designs of the buildings failing stability—opened up to the world beyond. It was a juddering, shuddering tunnel to freedom—freedom being, at this juncture, a faithless leap into icy water that Layton half-believed to be waiting below. Straining his ears to hear above the collapse, he could fool himself momentarily into believing he heard the splash of masonry landing below.

To the left of them, a wall surrendered to the inevitable and reduced itself to rubble, spitting dust into the passage and sending chunks of rock hurtling at the group under some anger-fed delusion that they should die with it. The projectiles missed, causing scrapes at worst. A particularly malicious rock knocked the intrusive hat from atop Layton's head, rolled through a crack in the floor and, smilingly, was gone.

Layton seized the hat before it too could disappear, then held it tenderly in his arms, halted in his tracks. Within his head there was a vice, pressing upon whatever had compressed his memories with relentless, senseless pressure, scraping the insides of his skull raw and curdling his brain. Something had to give.

The hat—it was a catalyst that could be provided by nothing else.

 _Randal. Henry. Claire. Desmond. Raymond._ Everything flooded back to its assigned spot in his mind, real and solid and familiar.

 _Misthallery. Loosha. The spectre and the flute._

 _Ambrosia. The Crown Petone. Janice and Melina._

 _Monte D'or. The dark miracles. The mask._

 _The legacy of the Azran. Rapt he journey across the globe. Targent. The ruins. His father, Bronev..._

 _The grand architect of it all, the enemy he faced at every turn; Jean Descole, his brother from more than a life time ago..._

Too late, Layton remembered the crumpled figure left lying at the foot of the crystal that had killed it. Too late, he remembered who that had been, what had happened to them, and that, though the Azran had been powerful enough to resurrect them, they had not healed him.

He didn't remember dropping Luke's hand; or turning on his heel and sprinting back towards the chamber; or replacing the hat upon his head.

He didn't hear Luke shout his name, or see the ceiling's guillotine fall, cutting off the corridor. Bronev, Emmy, and Luke plunged helplessly, harmlessly, into the waiting embrace of the water below, the surface choppy and ridged with white horses, the bottom a grave for a legacy.

Descole was lying where he had been abandoned, apparently at peace despite the utter carnage of the room around him. Shaken from its gilded supports, the crystal had fallen beside him, missing his chest by playful inches. Approaching his silent brother, Layton was reminded once again of the dead owl; Descole's cloak was spread about him in a messy, funeral shroud, like broken wings, the thin lines of his arms making slight ridges in the fabric. His boa was torn, bloodied courtesy of a sluggish cut on the man's forehead. He looked too fragile to be a man, closer to some broken, dying bird who knew nothing of the secrets of the world.

"Descole," Layton whispered, rolling his brother on to his back. He kept his own body bent low, shielding Descole as best he could, and whispered as though he believed the temple would hear him and destroy itself faster for his interruption.

The man in his arms did not stir. Cuts scored his face from where the white mask had broken, shards nestled snuggly against the split skin, the eyes inside those porcelain hollows bruised and gently closed. Descole's face was whey, his lips torn and pale. Layton did not have to lower his head to check if his brother still breathed—cleanly audible, Descole's breaths came sharp and harsh, fast as though they had been snatched from his lungs by some invisible, malevolent hand.

Layton felt over his brother's chest, the fabric of his suit front ragged and dirty, tie askew. It grew crisp at a point low on his abdomen, just above his hip bones and reaching up towards his ribs, the point where the Azran sentry had struck him. Clotted with debris and dirt, the bleeding skin beneath—a bubbling mess of burns that were chemical in their appearance, ridged with scorched tissue, rotted purple in colour—felt less like living flesh, and more like poorly aged leather, cracked and dry. Layton struggled to turn his thoughts away from whether or not such an injury was feasibly survivable, the analytic quarters of his mind muttering their dispassionate doubt.

"We have to go, Descole," Layton murmured, operating on some vague and hopeful delusion that told him his brother could hear. Awkwardly, he slid an arm beneath the unconscious figures shoulders and legs, struggling to avoid jostling him as the floor rocked and swayed, and the walls trembled. Not being a man accustomed to large weights, Layton was grateful to find that years of lifting weighty tomes and regular exercise had kept strong a body that his more scholarly pursuits might have otherwise withered; Descole's limp body was a light enough burden, in physical terms if not emotional. Though the weight was not a prevalent issue, Descole's height was, causing Layton to stagger more than once as he alternated his focus between dodging flying debris and supporting a figure slightly taller than himself. Descole groaned faintly, and—though the noise was felt more than it was heard—in Layton's mind, it was louder and more dreadful than the collapsing world around them.

Finding his way to open air again was an easier task than one may have predicted for, by that point, the vast majority of the walls had broken away, leaving only dusty imprints of themselves in the sudden sunlight. Exposed to open air for the first time in millennia, the doomed sanctuary wheezed fitfully and ripped holes in its own skin, cast into the lake from whence it came. Standing on a plinth that was rapidly defecting from the whole, Layton silently watched the destruction, the final death of the greatest civilisation ever documented. All their knowledge, technology, wisdom—ancient and irreplaceable—would follow the Azran to a silent grave.

It was a fact that he found so very insubstantial, compared to the body in his arms.

Finally, the cracks in the mortar gaping wide enough to warrant descent, the plinth obeyed the pull of gravity and began its final pilgrimage to the lake. They fell slowly; nature had bided many years to defeat the Azran, and now relished every inch of their declension.

Layton lay Descole down at his feet. With gentle fingers, he removed the boa and hat, and picked whatever he could of the mask away from his brothers cut face, before casting the incriminating items aside. The cape, he folded and stowed inside his blazer for safe keeping. In the space of a few seconds, Descole had died, and it was Desmond Sycamore who lay cradled in the Professor's arms.

Far below them, he could see boats, no larger than toys, hurrying towards the sinking pieces of building. Skimming over the waves, they too threatened to deny the laws of physics and reason, and take flight. Layton imagined them rising from the water like too-vibrant kites, the thought bringing a brief, sad smile to his lips; if the boats learnt to fly, they might make it in time. Desmond's breathing was terribly laboured, shaky and infirm. Had you held a feather to his lips, those breaths wouldn't have had the strength to stir the quills. Beneath the thick mask of dust, the undertones of his white face had shifted to grey, and the cuts on his face bled only sluggishly. It would have been easy to mistake him for a recently buried, and more recently unearthed, corpse—and Layton had enough experience to make such a distinction. An edgeless piece of his mind knew that, without some intervention, Descole's life wouldn't last much longer. Whatever rallying force that had fortified him enough to make it to the epicentre had diminished to nothing and whatever was left of the man stood on the dizzying precipice of oblivion.

Running a careful hand through his brother's mussed hair, Layton silently bargained with the uncharitable universe to let him hold out longer. But his own vision was beginning to fade, the headache that had been building since his reawakening beating darkness against the backs of his eyes.

As the lights of the day popped and swam, giving over to joyless night, the last Layton saw was the rising wall of foam, thrown up by the impact of their rock on the surface of the lake, the sound of said collision evading his fragmented mind. Boats surged towards them, but were missed by the Professor, as he too surrendered to peaceable unconsciousness.


	2. Chapter 2

Left alone to his thoughts, Layton wondered if his dislike of hospitals was an ingrained trait or a new development in his half remembered personality. He wasn't certain, but this particular one was beginning to grate on his last nerve. Everything was too bright a white, an aggressively pure shade that seemed cruelly conjoined with dentistries and infirmaries, and the few things that were in colour were pill-green and pill-pink, medicinal shades native to nothing else. It smelt too; sharply of soap, bleach, heady chemicals that barely masked the creep of infection.

Layton was in the process of silently bargaining with thin air. Each moment of silence, forced him to bid higher, as though he stood in some great courtroom, opposing some silent will interred with the ability and apathy to rip the world from beneath him.

 _Let him live and you can take my left arm._

Orderlies had taken Desmond away several hours ago, wheeled him away on a gurney through double doors whose bold, yellow lettering proclaimed doubtful and dangerous things. Operating theatre 03. People streamed from the room behind, ants daubed liberally with red that hurt Layton's eyes. He was sure that bystanders were not usually permitted this close to operations, twice as sure he didn't care.

 _Let him live and you can take my left leg._

It seemed inconceivable that the man who was at once his rival and constant companion would so suddenly quit his existence. Even without the revelation of certain personal connections, life without Descole's interference verged on unimaginable, an impossibility that Layton had no wish to consider. Like it or not, the masked individual had ingrained himself into Layton's conscience, and now lurked at the bottom of every mystery, in the answer to every puzzle. Descole was stability through madness, normalcy through aberrancy, and Layton couldn't bear for that to be dragged away, not now that his enemy had the chance to be something more.

 _Let him live and you can have both my legs._

Luke and Emmy had been cleared within moment of their entrance, sporting nothing more than bruises and scrapes. Their empty eyes had roved languidly about the rooms occupants, trailing glossily over Layton as though he were part of the decor and nothing more. Hands intertwined—clasping each other as though they were equal in age, as though her years did not more than double his—they left, casting nervy glances about them as they went, frightened children. Layton let them pass, affirming to himself that he would reunite with them later. Bronev's fate was uncertain, the Professor's apathy on that matter increasing by the minute.

A man exited the theatre, his gait somehow apologetic, as though he feared his existence were viewed as inconvenient. Though his hands were perfectly clean, there was a sheen of clammy sweat lingering in between his fingers that gave tell to the fact that they had been recently interred in latex gloves.

"Professor Hershel Layton?" The doctor's voice was kind. Layton wondered how much of it was facade. "You came in here with professor Desmond Sycamore, yes?" Layton managed a nod, every cell in his body crossed with some unquenchable hope that feared disappointment. The doctor drew a breath, released it as though it were heavy.

"You will be pleased to hear, his condition is stable. Skin from his lower back has been grafted on to the area that was damaged by the burn, and, with time, he is expected to make a full recovery. There are some minor complaints from his lungs due to the inhalation of dust, but nothing severe, and his condition is being monitored closely."

The knot that had been steadily tightening inside Layton's chest relaxed suddenly, releasing a string of his organs in to the looseness of relief. For the first time since entering, his heart kept a steady beat, his lungs drew full breath. It felt as though some unnamed calamity had been averted with seconds spare.

Things so pleasant as relief, however, are rarely allowed to last.

"Unfortunately, however," Layton's unwilling tormentor continued, sympathy thick in his eyes. "The extent of the trauma—the blood loss, the exertion, general stress of the wound—and our own medical sedation, have pushed him further in to unconsciousness than we would like. He is not comatose per se, but we are unsure of when he will wake or how he will react when he does." A sympathetic hand found its way to Layton's shoulder and was gone. "We will keep you informed."

With that, the faceless servant of medicine departed, fingers adopting their fresh skin of latex. Back in to the sunless world beyond the clinic doors, a world where he was a god, the nurses his apostles, and the patients the subjects who he would convert to health or condemn to a lingering death of illness. It struck Layton, then, that he had seen many creatures that day that he could call God.

Another gurney glided from elsewhere in the facility, passing Layton idly by. The body atop it was utterly still, looking to have never been animated, a dead slab of meat and bone not some complex plane of existence. It's face was hidden by cloth. That unreasonably pristine sheet covered it from prying eyes, but left the tagged feet visible—ugly square things edged with blue. In his mind, the Professor saw white and black shoes, adornments for a deadman's feet.

 _I bargained wrong_ , was Layton's only, foolish thought, as he left the invisible auction house, _I should have offered all my limbs from the start._

Outside, the air was pleasantly cool, shifting from foot to foot in contented listlessness. All the fuss—the ambulances arriving and exiting the facility car park, the mixture of relief and resignation—seemed to have passed the air by without comment; it acted in a manner which suggested all to be still, ridden with calm. All in all, it was ill-suited to the mind of the man who found himself sat upon the steps to the hospital.

With all manner of morbid, confused thoughts rattling inside a skull that felt a great deal emptier than usual, Layton glared at the cracked paving as though it had played a personal role in his recent misfortunes. Being rather indifferent to this treatment, the stone offered no comment. So they sat, in murky silence, until the point where Layton came aware of something tugging at the sleeve of his blazer.

"Professor?"

Disturbed from his brief melancholia, Layton looked up. A face met him, one with a snub nose, round eyes, and an element of androgyny that can only be provided by youth. His ruffled hair was boldly going without the protection of his hat, and so swept across his forehead in mussed curls; through that thin obstruction, the troubled water of his brow was stark.

"Luke, my boy," the phrase, once common, felt archaic on his tongue. In some distant way, he knew that he and the boy were close, but felt this information not as though he had lived through it, but as one would had they been told these things. They were facts, like the many things he had memorised from his university textbooks, and they held about as much meaning. The hat—Claire's hat—had restored his mind, but not given his thoughts their meaning. All through the film reels of his eidetic memory, there lay the same error, the same colourlessness. Everything was grey, tasteless, senseless, the lemon-zeal of his life gone. The desire to inject meaning into what he recalled, to once again feel his own mind, was maddening.

How one would go about such a puzzle as recovering feeling was the current occupation of his mind.

"I...I know you," Luke murmured, moving ponderously over the words. "You're the Professor, right?"

Layton paused, recalling his first wakeful moments in the sanctuary, that brief period of time where he had clutched at the fragments of what he knew. He thought it likely that Luke had forgone any awakening, and was still drifting in that miasma of forgetfulness.

"Professor who, Luke?" Layton probed gently. The boys face fell like a clumsy person down a flight of stairs.

"I don't know," he whispered, eyes lowered and brimming with tears. Again and again, like a man at confession, he offered the same, terrible, hushed words.

 _"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know..."_

For once, his mentor—a man who was barely known to his student, who barely felt worthy of the title of gentleman let alone idol—had now words to offer.

"Where's Emmy?" When the boy looked blank, he qualified, "the woman you were with before. You called her Emmy, do you remember?"

Luke furrowed his brows and reached in to the depths of his mind like a man reaching in to a den of vipers.

"I...yes...yeah, I remember," there was a heartbreakingly small amount of relief in that voice, "she...she's gone. They were taking that old man,"—from this, Layton presumed he meant Bronev—"away...they think he's a criminal. She was watching them and looking at a camera...and then she ran off..." Luke trailed off, some aspect of his mind distantly aware of the importance of what he had just imparted, "I knew her, didn't I?"

Layton could only sigh. Cardboard cutouts of a smiling Emmy danced woodenly through his thoughts, old photographs of her standing triumphant beside them, a fresh mystery dead on the floor. Something in the memory ached, some sweetness or cold that turned the minds tooth sour.

One by one, Layton bid the fond thoughts of his once-assistant farewell and released them into the wider ocean where they would drift and dissolve into time. He had to focus. Luke was here. Luke was real. Wherever she was—whatever she herself could recall—through her absence, she could be of no use now. Adventures with her were consigned to the ever-distant past; this present with Luke was insurance on a mysterious future.

With difficulty Layton wrestled his mind away from clammy thoughts of _what if_ and _why_ :

 _From the comatose man hospitalised in the building behind him._

 _From the young woman he would never reacquaint himself with._

 _From the Azran and the ramifications of their last gifts—the false one bestowed upon humanity, the reprise of their lives._

And wrapped his focus snuggly about Luke, a lifeline for them both.

"Do you remember where you live?"

"Misthallery. M-my dad...my dad was the mayor." Though the answer was haltingly given, Luke was fully confident by the sentences end. "You...you're a friend of my dad's. Professor Layton." The name was firm and bought an unflinching smile to the boys previously anxious face. Pulling his soft cap from a pocket in his shorts, he jammed it on to the messy bed of his head, crushing errant curls back into submission.

"Let's go then." The words caught and clung in his throat, unwilling to be forced from the safe confines of his mouth.

Under the cover of impending dusk, the Professor and his apprentice left for Misthallery, the sleepy riverside town that slumbered between rolling hills that rose and fell half a world away. They missed the butler's arrival by hours, and were already far away when he stole back his master and vanished into the everlasting blue of the night.

Luke's memory made an astounding recovery, once he was safely sequestered in the calmer waters of his home town. It was not, however, the miraculous garden with its ingrained healing properties, or the warm embrace of a familiar home that acted as the catalyst. Rather, the children of the town—a ragged groups of minor miscreants, water sprites and promising futures—made for the final nail in the coffin of whatever confined him. In particular, one young lady—nearly unrecognisable for those who had known her as a sickly waif, loitering at deaths door—seemed instrumental in that recovery, her childhood entwined with the boys own. Before long, Luke faced the same conundrum as his beloved Professor; his memory, while intact, was barren, devoid of feeling.

The remedy to this was an unexpected bounty. A photo album, sent through the anonymous postal system, arrived in Misthallery few days after them, tagged with the hand-written note; _I hope this helps. Thank you so much for the memories_. Inside it, the events of the last three years were documented in immaculately photographed detail, a comprehensive log of smiling faces and days that were, if not in meteorological terms, warm in spirit. With each page, Layton's recollection of their time bloomed with colour and feeling, his heart aching with it. When he thought of Monte D"or, he could now smell the roasted sand, feel the heat and the grate of sand-ridden wind; any memories of the Bostonius were flooded with the sound of propellers and the rich scent of tea. The world behind his eyes had been given its colour. Luke spent the better part of the day working methodical through its pages, committing each event to the archives, before silently turning it over to the Professor.

Upon their return to London, Layton placed the album in a heavily taped box he kept in the back of his wardrobe. It fit well, nestled among other reminders of a past he avoided, mementos that were too painful for regular viewing: _an orange ascot, smudged with dirt; trinkets from bittersweet times with friends who had vanished, through accident or design; one of Claire's headscarves, bound tightly around a boxed ring that he had once hoped to give her._

Several layers of tape resealed the box, and the album—its grateful note still attached—was abandoned. Occasionally, one of them would remove it, flick through its pages in silence, replace it with a resigned sigh. If either ever noticed this of the other, they didn't stay and, as far as any outsider was concerned, they continued as though the book did not exist.

Leon Bronev's trial was televised. Sat side by side, Layton and Luke watched its entirety—defence, prosecution, and sentence—in silence that felt like marble. It's conclusion was met with that same granite quiet. They say in the dark for a long while afterwards.

Attempts to contact the hospital at which he had abandoned his brother were refuted with claims that the patient had gone 'missing' shortly after his surgery. Targent being disbanded, Desmond being fairly innocuous, Layton's concern—while present—was considerably muted; he could think of at least one friendly party who would have both the ability and motivation to abscond with the injured man. These fears were entirely allayed—and his speculations confirmed—by the arrival of a letter, a month and a half after the Azran resurrection.

These letters continued between the two, a correspondence that lasted a further three years, until the doomsday machine of one Clive Dove brought them crashing back into each others lives.

But that would come with time; penning his first response, a cold night in January, Layton offered the paper a small smile, pen making broad sweeps over its blank surface. Another storm would come, he knew, but his family had survived the Azran—not intact, but alive—and everyone he loved was still standing.

For that night, that was enough.


	3. Chapter 3

Three years, five months, two weeks, and five days. That was how long the peace lasted.

At 10:38pm, Tuesday, November 9th, Clive Dove's mechanical monstrosity burst through the skin of London. Utter ruin followed, as the thing rampaged across the city. Alone, each of its feet would have been considered a sizeable weapon; with four, combined in to one machine, the walking gun tower was an incomprehensible nightmare for the terrified citizens who were unlucky enough to witness the carnage first hand.

At the epicentre of this storm, there was a young boy, a girl without a family, a professor of archeology, and a ghost, flying through the air in a car with wings. To them, the situation was not particularly unusual at all.

Still, it was rare that the stakes climb so high. Struggling to maintain a steady course against the relentless buffeting of the winds, Professor Layton forced his mind away from the last time the stakes had been this high. The threat of a flattened London summoned other images— _golems departing the temple, wicked purpose well in motion; Monte D'Or vanishing beneath the shifting desert floor_ —thoughts of past times that, though related, were not conducive to the task at hand; namely, flying the Laytonmobile through increasingly turbulent air towards the looming behemoth set on obliterating the old city. Following their recovery, his memories had near perfect clarity, each one as pristine as it had been the day it formed, something which was both a blessing and a venomous curse.

It made losing _her_ again so much harder...

It made _this_ —standing on a pier side, looking out at the departing ship—almost unbearable. When he could perfectly recall every smile, every conversation, every golden moment, how was it fair to expect him to stand by and let them go?

But life is not fair. Little by little, the great vessel shrunk to a splotch, carrying all the endlessly insignificant lives it ferried over the flat line of the horizon. Whatever adventures waited beyond the skyline would be faced by that little family, alone: Clark, Brenda, Luke, and _Flora_.

Layton had always known that he was not meant to be a father, much less one to someone as impressionable and innocent as Flora. The startling discrepancy between the girl and her peers—despite her spending three full years as an integrated part of society—illustrated this perfectly; there was no avoiding the glaring fact that Flora was a strange child—whether through Layton's fault, or simply a result of her robotic childhood, that was debatable. From wherever this queerness originated, it made Layton wary to willingly incorporate her into his 'adventures'. Luke—who was every inch the wily, clear-headed, intuitive boy his upbringing should have produced—could be trusted to keep himself out of the serious, but mundane, dangers of everyday city life. Flora couldn't be trusted to cook bacon. More than that, Luke knew how to be a child; he had a certificate from a course of life that Layton, accurately, felt he was unqualified to teach.

 _Clark and Brenda understand children, and she has Luke to count on_ , was the comfortless mutter of his mind, but, for once, logic failed under the crushing weight of some insensible emotion, one that, unlike many others, he could not simply lock in a box and hide in the back of his cupboard.

Mostly because that box no longer existed.

Because that cupboard no longer existed.

Nor did his flat, or the building that housed that flat, or the street that building had sat on. The gaping maw summoned by the subterranean detonation of the fortress had swallowed his life whole. With one decisive gulp, it had taken streets, houses, businesses, and lives to rest with it in the dirt. Whole families had been wiped out over the course of one, devastating night.

Such was the legacy of the unfortunate Clive Dove.

Unable to wrap itself about the full weight of that tragedy, Layton's mind kept returning to the fact that both his home and Gressenheller were irrevocably gone.

Rosa—fussily endearing Rosa—was gone.

Dean Delmona was gone.

The families and friends of some of his students were gone. Some of his _students_ were gone.

The inhabitants of the false Future London were gone.

That Luke and Flora were gone and, once again, Professor Layton was alone.

He was, he had decided some time before dropping the pair off at the ferry, better off without company, in these circumstances—effectively homeless and jobless. It took some of the sting out of the idea, alleviated some of the burden of responsibility...

He could survive on his own.

The universe had disagreed with those thoughts, which found him standing where he was now, with a figure at his back, both silent and staring emptily out to sea. From the corners of his eyes, Layton could just make out the distinctive white toes of his unwanted companion's shoes.

Swift as a shadow, the ship slipped off the face of the earth. Nothing about the empty harbour changed for its absence—the sea lapping placidly at the pier wall; the ever-distant cry of the mournful gulls; the still, lonely figures standing where the ship's departure had left them—but a great weight seemed to slip tiredly out of the air, sinking below the sea to settle elsewhere. Layton missed the crushing, grounding pressure of it.

Needing something to do, he found himself acting on the one impulse he had promised himself he wouldn't succumb to; raising his voice and addressing the stranger behind him, a man who was not, in fact, so strange at all.

"I didn't think I would see you again." Even he was shocked at the bland monotone of his voice.

Standing precisely a foot behind and half a foot to the left of the Professor, Desmond Sycamore gave the back of his brother's head a sad smile.

"I needed to know that you were alright..." Despite the fact that Layton was turned from him, Sycamore dipped his head, hiding any emotion in his eyes with a deft flick. "I was, thankfully, out of London for the...incident."

"I'm glad." Layton could not quite bring himself to be monosyllabic—the gentleman in him refused to stoop—but unacknowledged grief does not make for a compelling spokesman. He tried again—his voice slipped into inaudibility, the words blurred together in a haze of unshed tears.

"Luke and Flora are gone."

Layton did not expect his brother—colleague, enemy, friend; the other professor was many things, mostly incomprehensible—to hear him much less respond. As always, Desmond had an unerring proclivity for being surprising.

"To America, yes?" When there was no response, he pressed on. "They'll be happy there, I imagine; there's a wealth of amazing things in the Colonies. I can assure you that Luke will thrive in such an environment. And Flora couldn't wish for a better influence..."

Having only ever heard of Flora through letters, Sycamore was unsure of what to do with her. The pen and paper girl built up in his mind was endued with every fear Layton had ever built for her, every insecurity he had ever described in relation to the girl. Even as he spoke, all he could see, in his minds eye, was a crumpled figure in a cardboard dress, ribbon hair mussed by a capricious breeze, squealing as the sea jumped at her like a dog. Wet tongues of water slapped at her face and, laughter turned to screams, she turned away, the Indian ink of her eyes melting and the blurred, half circle of a mouth dripping and formless.

Sycamore swallowed the grim thought down. "America can't be any more perilous than London is at present."

Layton offered a noncommittal noise in unequal return for the reassurance. He looked at the horizon as though he thought he could have his time again, summon the ship back through some Herculean feat of sheer will and send it off again, two passengers lighter.

But such was never to be—the sky continued to darken and clocks ticked forwards, each second pushing him towards an uncertain fate he no longer had the strength to consider.

Layton's metaphysical self shook its head roughly, latching on to Desmond once more. His brother was not phantasmagorical or illusionary—he was painfully real, coldly anchored the present. More than that, he was a stark warning, a story of caution for those who lingered too long in the company of an impossible past.

"How have you been, Desmond?"

Sycamore took the abrupt change of subject in stride. "Oh, well enough." He pushed his glasses further up his nose. "I've recently redirected my studies, and there have been some promising breakthroughs in my line of work...people are a lot more willing to believe in the unnatural, these days..."

Layton pondered this briefly; Desmond had been uncharacteristically mysterious about his new line of study, whenever the subject arose in their correspondence, but such curiosities had been pushed to the murkier depths of Layton's mind by his own fresh predicaments and subsequently been forgotten. Belatedly, he felt that aged interest stir, then fall once more still, quashed by grieving apathy. One last search for meaningful words yielded nothing, the vocabulary of an empire sitting in dusty ruin on his tongue, he took the meat from the hook and watched the bobber drift slowly by.

For the longest time, neither man spoke, and all around them, the sea hushed itself to slumber, the sun sank in the ever-darkening bed of the sky, and shadows stretched their long limbs and prepared for evening. A siren wailed thinly in the distance, ensnared by concrete and devoured. Life carried on, even if it didn't feel like it would.

Night found the two men still stood on pier side and, surprised that they were there still, flicked two street lamps on to light them, and went about her trade in the rest of town. Layton sighed; dusk was the same for their absence. So was the taste of dust on his tongue, the too-bright fluorescence of neon signs, and the distant smell of cheap takeaway shops. So was the distant shuffle of wearied feat, the industrial chatter of construction, and the ink-dark plumes of smoke rising ominously from chimney stacks towering haphazardly along the skyline. Layton saw all and felt nothing; even stripped of his memories and left bare in a bizarre and inconsiderate world, he had felt something, echoes of a greater sense.

He'd never been this empty...empty enough to fall to the ground and have no recollection of it...empty enough to speak without realising it...

"There's going to be nothing left of London when this storm blows over." Empty enough to hear his own voice and not recognise it...to not feel his estranged brother's hands on his shoulders, his arms, his face as the other anxiously twisted him about, held him tight...

"Layton, I don't give a damn about London." Looking at Sycamore, one could either be amused or unnerved; caught between the brotherly concern of Desmond and the determined frustration of Descole, his face wore two very different expressions, duel personalities fighting for control of their mutual endeavour. "All I care about is whether you're still standing when this atrocious mess dies down."

Unknowingly, Layton smiled and absentmindedly tucked a loose curl of hair behind his brother's ear. Descole's ire melted.

"I'm touched, Desmond."

They remained like that for a long while, the frigid damp of the pier seeping through their clothes and chilling them until neither was sure if they had pressed together for comfort or for warmth. Their silhouettes were siamese, curled upon the nearest wall like tame cats before a cold fire. Layton shifted, feeling Sycamore's hair brush his cheeks, tucked into the crook between the other man's neck and shoulder. Desmond heaved a sigh.

"I have a small request..."

"And what is that?"

"Come with me. Next time I leave the city. There's nothing left here, for anyone..." _I want to be there this time. Leaving never worked, so let me stay. Let me stay with you, anywhere but here._ "I'm not walking away this time, Hershel. If you want to stay here, I'll remain with you...but you won't survive; London is falling." Descole submerged the softness, pouncing on the darker idea and sweeping Desmond's sentiments away in the tide if his own fears. "I'll be damned if I let you go down with it!"

Water lapped hesitantly at the pier, unsure of the situation it was interrupting.

"Where do you propose we go?" Layton whispered, suddenly feeling to be a rather small force to pit against the full weight of the disapproving world, the emptiness of the sky above him a yawning abyss, a pair of thin, warm-fleshed arms almost desperately wrapped about him. Sycamore's voice was a wavering thing that would have liked to be firm but, in the light of all that had happened, both recently and in years past, found itself shaking and quiet.

"Anywhere." Anywhere but here. "The university is funding my research trips, and I am a man of not inconsiderable substance. My next venture will most likely take me up country..." He trailed off, a helpless murmur of please caught on the thorns of his lips, wrapped about his poison ivy tongue. Words—the wrong ones said too late had cost him his family once. Now he lay on that thin line once more, hoping against hope that he had somehow arrived in time to keep this vestigial and uncertain relationship.

The younger was silent. Already fractured, Layton's mind near broke at the thought of leaving London behind him; for thirty years, London had provided him a home, a glittering concrete empire in which he could thrive. That he would go on without it was incomprehensible...

"Layton?"

Finally, Layton faced his estranged brother, looked at him properly. It was a sobering experience for many reasons; Desmond was, in appearance, exactly the same as he had been all those years ago, down to the last curl of his hair. Perhaps the eyes were altered, for their time apart—they were a little sadder, a little harder—but in them lurked the same fire, the same determination and warmth that was ubiquitous to the man the world knew as Desmond Sycamore. It was the same face that had smiled up at him through pages of Emmy's photographs, the same face that had stood beside others now lost to him, faces now ashes and smoke. Feeling as though letting him slip from sight could steal him away entirely, Layton wondered how it came to be that everyone he loved was made out of paper. The world was ephemeral and temporary, London a cardboard fort left too long in the rain— _even the things we adore as stone and iron cannot withstand forever. Everything must come to dust_. Something hot stung at his eyes, and Layton blinked hurriedly, half-afraid that the warmth would burn and blister Desmond, leave him strung out on the floor as he so often lay in the darkest depths of the younger man's dreams.

"Everything's gone, Desmond."

"I know," murmured his enemy, his equal, and his opposite. Two simple words—helpless, simple, commiserative, pointless, desperately needed understanding. It was enough. "I know."

Three days later, a red automobile trundled its way out of London for the last time, tendrils of smog and bowed lampposts bidding it fond farewell as it and its occupants headed elsewhere, in search of a fresh adventure, the great city waving a tissue of cloud as its greatest detective left its gates for what was to be the final time.

 **TBC.**


End file.
